From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating artwork with filled shapes - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating artwork with filled shapes

- [Instructor] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. Creating compelling visuals for design and illustration requires the ability to deduce shape and form, when creating theme specific images. So, in this movie, we're going to take a closer look at how you can approach any theme, analyze it, and creatively discern how to create it visually using simple vector shapes, and build methods, so let's jump into it. Now, the theme for this project is going to be a bear. The photograph reference you see in front of you is specifically of a grizzly bear because that's the type of bear I kind of want to capture for the project I'm going to be working on, and we want to look at real world reference even though we may be creating something that is very iconic, very graphic, and stylized. We can capture those essence, the essence of a bear that is, the cues of what makes a bear look like a bear, and that's what we're going to do now. We're going to turn this into black and white, drop a guide down the center of his head because we're going to think in a symmetric type of way, meaning we're going to create a simplified graphic. Now, this actually isn't the graphic we're creating for this project, I'm just using this to explain how you look at any image. Let's go ahead, and get a little closer here on the bear's face. And, when you look at a bear it's specifically real world images, not other artwork other people created, or other graphics because you don't know how well they interpreted that theme, whether it's a bear, or any other thing, so it's always good to go back to the real, and refer to that because that is what you want to take your cues on. So, as I look at a bear, it has a very characteristic shape to its head, the top of its head kind of bends inward, and makes a little subtle curve at the top of his head. You can see that right here, and then it kind of goes up, and then it starts swooping down on the side. Bears have very wide heads, and their eyes are small, and tend to be towards the inside of that voluminous shape that is their head. So, that's one thing we're going to capitalize on, and bears are obviously furry, they have a lot of fur. We're not looking at the detail of at the edge of the fur because there's a lot of little points that make up the fur because fur is very detailed. We're simplifying that, we're alluding to the fact that there's fur by creating these kind of cut-ins. But, we're following the shape, and form of the head as it swoops down to the very bottom. But, because we've handled the edge of that shape the way we have, there's no question that people read this as fur. The shape of his ear, more circular, bears ears tend to sit right at the top of their heads, and they don't flop down, they're very perky if you will. Their eyes are very simplified, so we made that shape very simplified. The top edge of its snout, I guess you'd call it, the nose, we simplified that shape, and form down to an essence of a simpler shape to make that up along with the bottom of his mouth. Now, you don't see the inside of his mouth, but this would work really well if we wanted to create a graphic, we would just select everything we've already created, and we had go Command C, Command F, and then we'd go to the reflect tool, find a central anchor point, make sure you have smart guides turned on, Command U, select it. Flip it, and you can see quickly, you could create a nice symmetric graphic motif for the bear's head as shown here. Now, I want my bear to be more aggressive, kind of a fierceness to it. And, I want its teeth to be showing. And, this dude is kind of laid back, like, I'm just a bear. I'm just kind of a chillin out waiting for salmon. This isn't going to work, in terms of what I want to create, specifically, but this is how exactly I approach the process of looking at a theme, in this case a bear, and discerning shape, and form, and simplifying it, forcing myself to think, what's the simplest way I can create this shape, and then that's going to work well for a very stylized graphic in this case. But, we want to focus on its mouth now because I want to capture that kind of fierceness that you see when a bear roars. And, this is an actual bear's mouth. We'll do the same thing, where we turn it to black and white, and we're going to use this to inspire our creation of the detailing of his teeth, and the inside of his mouth. Now, this photograph, specifically this bear, I don't think has seen a dentist in a while because the tips of his teeth are kind of broken off. You can see he's missing a tooth here, and these are, you know, he probably didn't wear his braces like he's supposed to, and so now he has very ugly teeth. But, this is going to guide our proportions, and we're going to use artistic license to kind of improve the look, and feel of this bear's mouth. But, this is going to guide us in knowing, okay, how exactly should these be, kind of, simplified to read as the teeth of the bear, and you can see I created these shapes shown on the right, and I just clone flipped them as we did the head to get everything we needed here, so I can just select these shapes, and I can unite them together with pathfinder. Same thing with the tongue, unite those together, and the teeth down the bottom, the same thing. Select those, and unite them together. But, notice how I didn't follow exactly what the photograph did, I just let it, kind of, guide me. And, I just made it look better. Once again, I took a little artistic license. It's not about mimicking reality. It's about using reality to guide our simplification, in creating the graphic to look cool even though it might not be exactly 100% accurate to what an actual bear tooth might look like,. These are probably a little more curve than what a bear tooth really is, but it's going to read really well if we turn this into a graphic. So, I just wanted to walk through that because when I approach a project like this, this is the type of thinking I do. And, I spend a lot of time, kind of, looking at this, and analyzing this, and trying to figure out if this is going to work, and this is, kind of, how I criticize my own inner thoughts as I'm working out, and problem solving shape, and form. So, we're going to turn on this sketch that I created after looking at a lot of references of bears. And, this one is specifically symmetric meaning I only drew half of it. We're going to go ahead, and set this to 20%, and I'm going to go ahead, and lock the layer, and where I usually start on a project like this is I start, where I can use simple shapes. In this case, circles, and we're going to use nothing but circle shapes, no pen tool whatsoever. And, to create this shape of the motif of the ear on this graphic. So, we'll take these two circles, and I'll go ahead, and minus front with the one circle on top. I'll select the next circle, another circle, use pathfinder to minus front. Select everything here, unite them, and you can see how quickly it goes to create a form such as the top of the ear here. Now, this inside area, this I don't have to worry about because I'm going to end up fusing this ear with the half of his head shape. So, it's not really going to matter. I just want to show you that I usually, I try to use simple shapes anywhere I can. And, there's other areas on this motif if we turn on the full base vector art here, and we zoom in, you can see I've used simple shapes, another circle to create the inside area of the ear. You saw how I created the outside obviously on the eye. We can go ahead, and take areas like that, where I created the inside the eye, and the highlight that we're going to be using. That's also a circle, but we can take this, take this eye shape, punch this through to get the final shape we're after, as shown there. And, that's all I'm going to do, is I'm going to use simple shapes. Now, even though at times I'll draw out what I think I'll need, I'll make decisions to revise that even before I keep moving forward on a project. So, if I zoom in on the nose, let me turn off these shapes really quick. Notice how he I drew the nose it was a little wider, a little squattier, and after looking at more and more reference of a bear, I realize that's really not the way their noses are shaped. They're shaped more like this. Once again, it's not photorealistic, but this is more bearlike if you will. So, those are the things you want to keep in mind, and a good argument for using real world reference. So, all we're going to do here is, I'm going to go ahead, and select these two shapes, and I'm going to, well actually, before I do that, let's select this shape, and I'm going to clone it, Command C, Command F, select this shape, I'm just going to trim that off because we don't want that to cut in. Then, I'll select the ear, and the head, and we can fuse those together, since those are going to work together like this. You can see I drew out this other detailing on the head, and I'll show you that a little bit. I ended up not liking it, so I'm not going to use it, but I did build it to try it first. But, what we're going to do now is, we're just going to go ahead, and select everything minus the highlight on the nose. Clone it, since the highlight on the nose is already kind of covering the left and right, we don't need to clone that. And, we'll select these, the head shape here, fuse those together, select the eyebrows here. The snout, the bottom of his mouth, and we're going to unite all of these together into one shape. We'll select the nose, and the area under the nose, fuse those together, and if I go ahead, and just so you can see what I'm doing, if I color this grey, we're just going to make sure we have our layering right, so I'm going to paste this behind the nose because I want to select this, select this shape. And right now, if I select this, and I go to a appearance, notice it says group. You want to make this, make sure this is a compound because one thing in Illustrator, it acts like it's a compound, but if it's a group, what's going to happen is, if I try to select this, and punch it through, things will disappear like that. And, it's kind of annoying, not sure why it does that. So, I always, after I unite something like this, I'll hit F7, which runs a compound on it, and turns it into a compound, that way I can select a shape, punch it through, and it doesn't disappear. But notice, it will revert back to a group. So, every time I use a pathfinder method, I hit F7 to return to a compound nature. I'll select all the teeth, and we'll unite those together like this. We're going to select this, and now this is where the coloring comes in because we have all the elements for composition put together, so I'm going to turn on this tonal family. We have a simplified color palette going here. We'll go ahead, and color the bear. This is a black bear. Actually, let's do this, I'm going to cut this. I'm going to select everything, and paste it behind, so we don't lose any shapes. Select this, and, on this guy we'll make it grey, his eyes, I want him menacing, and this is where we're taking some artistic license. His eyes would never be, well I guests they might be black if he got punched in the eye, or something, but we're making him, I mean red, we're making them red just to make him look more menacing, and we're going to turn these areas here darker grey, lighter grey, and these will be white. So, now that we have our flat colors dropped in, I do want to turn on this one. We can actually turn off a refined sketch. I had these in, I didn't mind these. I thought they're okay, but I thought they could be done better, so I'm not going to include those at this point. It's after I started thinking about this that I came back later, and I realized how better to poll that kind of detailing off, so I'm going to turn this on. You can see that's exactly what I did. Not only that, I also did another detail. So, if I toggle this off, just watch the artwork. Notice the mouth, and the nose highlight, and other various details like in the sides of the eyes. I've just made little minute changes to improve the artwork as I go forward, and I'm always doing that, when I'm creating design. I like to set things aside even if it's only a couple hours, come back to it later, and kind of scrutinize it, and figure out, could this look better? Would it work better handling something a different way, and that was definitely true with the detailing on the fur. I think this looks a lot better now, and really, kind of, gives it an intensity that is working really nice, and it's at this point that I go back to analog. I print this out in black and white, and then I simply just start drawing on it with a pencil to figure out how am I going to shade it, how am I going to compose it? Once I had this scan back in, then I'll go back in, and build those shapes just like I built other shapes, and this is where I will use the pen tool to create shapes like this. But, it makes the process easier. So, when it's all said and done, I have a nice piece of refined simplified stylistic art of a bear that's going to work great for the context of this project. Now, this project was for a client of mine called Deluxe Brewing, here in Oregon, and they do all these special small batch beers, and this beer was specifically a Russian Rye. That's why I was playing off of the bear, strong like Bear is kind of the thinking behind it. And, on this design, we created this label for this specific skew of product. Styled it like this Soviet era graphics. Dropped the bear in, worked really great. It was fun seeing this, in all the grocery stores around the Willamette Valley area, where I live. They're still there, they're still some. And, this shows it on the bottle itself. So, a fun project to work on, but it's a good example of how you can take anything, maybe you're not doing a bear, maybe you need to create something, and it utilizes a bird. Let's say it's a parrot. Then, look at real world reference of a parrot, and figure out how you can simplify. How you can bake that down to work in a graphic way to be used on whatever the project is you're working on. It's a methodology and skill set that you will use throughout your career. And, the more you can improve on it the more valuable you become to your clients, and be enabled to service them the way you can best to pull off pretty much anything you need in a design, or illustrative context. So remember, drawing in any form is a progressive skill. You start at some point, and continue to improve with time. The benefit drawing brings to a digital context will expand your creative potential, and you'll be able to use it for a lifetime of creativity. That's the very best argument for it. So, the investment of time is well worth the effort. So, thank you for watching DVG Lab, and until next time, as always, never stop drawing.

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